Roberto Hernandez, a community activist, speaks to the crowd at City Hall where Protesters accused San Francisco of driving out its communities of color by deliberately failing them in the provision of all manner of public services.
Event on 10/16/06 in San Francisco.
Penni Gladstone / The Chronicle

The guero's impatience became increasingly apparent with each blare of the horn. But it didn't faze Roberto Hernandez.

"Doesn't he know lowriders are supposed to go slow?" Hernandez said as he inched his white 1964 convertible Chevrolet Impala down Valencia Street. He waved the blond in the sport utility vehicle to go around, and the driver sped past Hernandez's lowrider with a furious rev of the engine.

Leaning back in the driver's seat and cruising with the top down on a sunny afternoon, Hernandez looks every bit the monarch of the Mission District. He's wearing his white fedora, his matching button-down shirt and his orgullo - pride.

The Mission native has spent most of his 57 years "fighting, fighting, fighting." Fighting to end gun and gang violence. Fighting for better educational opportunities for Latinos. Fighting to save Carnaval. Fighting for immigrant rights.

"In 2004, I was chasing Schwarzenegger to get him to back driver's licenses and IDs. At the end of the day, he screwed us all - and he was screwing a Latina," he bellows, laughing. "Now, he has a little brown one running around."

The fight to allow people who aren't in the country legally to obtain driver's licenses ended last fall with Gov. Jerry Brown's signature on a bill.

Now, Hernandez faces perhaps his biggest fight: gentrification - or what he interchangeably refers to as "displacement," "the housing crisis" and the "killing of the city's soul."

'I'm being evicted'

The stories began surfacing last summer.

"We kept hearing, 'Hey I'm being evicted' or 'My landlord wants to pay me to leave,' " Hernandez said as he sat in the aqua blue living room of his art-filled Florida Street home.

It started with families, and soon longtime institutions along 24th Street in the Mission were threatened with eviction: St. Peter Bookstore and G.G. Tukuy Indigenous Arts and Crafts.

Hernandez joined with Erick Arguello, president of the Lower 24th Street Merchants and Neighbors Association, and Jose Carrasco, a youth services manager at the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center, to found Our Mission No Eviction. The size of the group's first rally on Oct. 12 - a march along 24th Street - stunned the organizers.

"We expected about 50 people to show up. Hundreds did," Hernandez said.

Then came the annual Dia de Los Muertos procession on Nov. 2. Some Latinos in the Mission were already annoyed that the event had, for years, been more of a Bohemian Halloween parade than a traditional celebration to honor dead loved ones. So the Our Mission No Eviction contingent rolled through with hundreds of Latinos carrying a 7-foot lit-up calavera (skull) with the words "Aqui estamos y no nos vamos" (We're here and we're not leaving).

"Not only was it Dia de Los Muertos but it was the muerte of our barrio," says longtime Valencia Street resident and schoolteacher Nancy Obregon, a longtime friend of Hernandez's who participated in the event after staying away for about 15 years.

That night, Hernandez was approached by residents from different parts of the city who were being evicted or had been forced to move because of rising rents. There was a 91-year-old woman from Nob Hill who had nowhere else to move, a police officer from Bernal Heightswho was living in Oakland, and a firefighter from the Mission who had moved to Pittsburg.

And then there was the evicted couple and their three children who left the Mission for Bay Point, 38 miles away in Contra Costa County. The entire family commutes to and from San Francisco, where the parents work and children continue attending school. "Now, they leave at 5 to take the bus to BART, catch another bus to get their kids from BART to school and another bus to get to work. They get home at 8," Hernandez says. "They pay $393 every month for transit."

And the rub is, Hernandez says, that sometimes the kids miss school breakfast because their buses are delayed by Google buses and other private tech shuttles that are allowed to use Muni bus zones.

"If you or I pull into a bus zone, we get a ticket," Hernandez said.

His seething sense of unfairness led to action: Our Mission No Eviction organized tech bus protests, and Hernandez went to the podium of several City Hall meetings to demand justice for the working poor.

"What Roberto's exposing is a reality that affects primarily low-income folks - those who are not represented at City Hall no matter what Ed Lee says," said Santiago Ruiz, the executive director of the Mission Neighborhood Centers Inc., a nonprofit that assists low-income families and seniors. "That, in my opinion, is true leadership."

A man of many hats

There's little Hernandez hasn't been involved in around the Mission over the past four decades.

"One thing the Mayans taught me is that we're here to visit the earth. So what are you going to do with your visit?" Hernandez says.

He's an artist whose paintings portray aspects of Mayan culture. He's the founder of the San Francisco Lowrider Council, a member of the Mission Merchants Association and the executive director of Carnaval. He is working on a five-year plan with the Mission Peace Collaborative, a coalition of neighborhood organizations, to end gun and gang violence in the Mission. He also has pushed for the establishment of a downtown Mexican Museum and has served as the director of several community-based organizations, among them the now-defunct Real Alternatives Program, which guided at-risk youths, including Hernandez himself as a teen.

On a typical day, Hernandez runs from one appointment to the next - showing up in court to support someone fighting eviction, meeting with other community leaders on gang and gun violence, mapping out the Carnaval route, training the next generation of Carnaval organizers.

At a merchants gathering on a recent weekday at the Latin American Club on 22nd Street, San Francisco police Cmdr. Bob Moser, the former Mission Station police captain recently appointed to oversee the Investigations Division, commended Hernandez for his work to end violence.

"Roberto, thank you for all the work you've done at Mission Station," Moser said to applause.

The irony is that the safer streets Hernandez longed for were ushered in with gentrification.

"Drug dealing, robberies, assaults - and all the problems that go with gang members and their rivalries - that has certainly decreased. It's not what it once was," said Mission Station's new police captain, Dan Perea, who started his police career as a young officer in the Mission 23 years ago.

He attributes the safer streets to the department's work with community leaders like Hernandez and federal law enforcement agents, who helped lock up the worst offenders.

Violence, nonetheless, persists.

"There was a shooting right here," Hernandez says, standing outside his home on Florida between 25th and 26th streets and pointing to the street where, on March 9, a police officer was shot in a friendly fire incident during a traffic stop.

He figuratively and literally wears many hats. He owns 51, and the scar on his head from a stabbing during a fight long ago is hidden underneath one of those hats much of the time. He is a divorced father of seven and grandfather of 13, with family throughout the Bay Area. And, he is a recovered alcohol and cocaine addict - 19 years clean - whose life's journey was, at times, pitch-black.

Born in the USA

Hernandez's mother, Haydee, was six-months pregnant with her third child in 1956 when she boarded a plane and left Nicaragua. She joined her husband, older children and mother-in-law in San Francisco, in a bustling three-bedroom apartment above the old five-and-dime at 24th and Florida streets.

On June 23, she gave birth to Hernandez at San Francisco General and then soon started working like the other adults in the household, toiling in rice mills, a heater factory and at the wharf as crab fishermen to support the family.

"No one in my household knew English," Hernandez said. So when he started kindergarten at Bryant Elementary School, his mother forced him to watch "Leave It to Beaver" and "The Ed Sullivan Show." Her mantra became: Aprender el ingles - Learn English.

By around age 7, Hernandez would hop on Muni and head to Fisherman's Wharf to bring dinner to his father, Roger. Then he would shine shoes for 5 cents a pop as he waited for his father to haul his last catch of crab.

A pivotal turn came when he was about 12. His father joined Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers' grape boycott and opened the family home - then an apartment on York Street between 22nd and 23rd - to labor organizers. The boy's world became a kaleidoscope of union leaflets, posters and signage as people passed through his home.

In the summer of 1968, his father sent Hernandez and his older brother 260 miles south to Delano (Kern County) to help the farmworkers union.

"An old stinky bus picked us up, and as it got close to Delano, it got hotter and smellier," Hernandez said. "The bus stopped in front of an old, old, old church in Delano."

The boys, carrying their sleeping bags, were led inside and shown a floor.

"We were told, 'This is where you will sleep.' "

It was a moment that changed Hernandez forever.

He was upset. What way was this to spend summer?

"But it was such a big eye-opener. I connected the dots. I saw how hard people worked in the fields. Then I saw them living in cardboard boxes," he said. "It made me angry. I couldn't believe people were treated that way."

But back at home, at St. Peter's School, Hernandez wasn't doing well socially or academically. He fought, drank and used drugs, a downward spiral that landed him in juvenile detention.

"My dad took me to skid row and said, 'If you don't learn to control your drinking, here is where you will die.' "

To help set his son straight, Roger Hernandez sent the teen to a reform school outside San Francisco, and at age 18, Hernandez returned home with his high school diploma and an invitation to study at the University of San Francisco.

But the thing about growing up Latino in the Mission, Hernandez says, is that you never really master English or Spanish.

Frustrated at USF because he was unable to read or write college-level English, Hernandez walked away - twice - before finally earning a bachelor's degree in 1999 by completing a series of essays about his life.

When Hernandez was about 20, he took his first full-time job as an organizer with the Real Alternatives Program. Within three years, he was the director. It was the kickoff to a career as a community activist and a years-long battle with addiction as a "functioning addict," as he called himself.

The changing Mission

Hispanics have called the Mission area home since Spanish settlers erected Mission Dolores in 1776 on what is now Dolores Street and began converting Ohlone natives to Christianity.

But the Mission's fate as a working-class neighborhood of mostly European immigrants was sealed 100 years later - between 1865 and 1883 - by the installation of horse-car lines along Mission, Valencia and Folsom streets. The lines carried workers - many of them Irish, Scandinavian, Scottish and German immigrants - to and from the cheap housing in the Mission and the longshore, construction, mill and factory jobs South of Market.

In the 1950s, a new wave of immigrants - mostly from Mexico, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico - swept into the Mission, opening up panaderias, carnicerias, taquerias and fruterias and transforming the area into a Latino stronghold.

"This is not going to go away," Hernandez says. "This isn't like the dot-com" bubble of the late '90s that gave the Mission a taste of gentrification.

One Latino family after another is moving away, replaced mostly by highly educated and highly compensated white tech workers who pay $3,500 or more a month to rent or more than $1 million to buy a condo or apartment.

Hernandez points from one property to another around his home: "No children. No children. No children."

He estimates that his block has lost about 24 children in the past 18 months as families have left.

Cordiality being lost

What is being lost, Hernandez says, is not only the district's distinct blend of Latino cultures but cordiality among people. The young, new passersby on the streets, sometimes plugged in to their electronic devices, avoid eye contact and don't say good morning or good afternoon.

"It's like we're invisible," Hernandez says.

Hernandez tells about a group of gueras who exited a Mission bar. As they crossed paths with him, he heard one of the young women on her cell phone: "Yeah, I'm down here in the Mission slumming."

He couldn't help himself.

"Excuse me, did you say you are here slumming? I was born and raised here, and I think it's very disrespectful."

Her friend's explanation: "She's just drunk."

"I get angry," Hernandez says about the changing neighborhood. "I have worked to let go of that anger and be compassionate and reach out and say, 'Good morning. Good afternoon. Where are you from?' "

He has also demanded action from city leaders - including the mayor, whom he met with in January in an effort to persuade Lee to declare a state of emergency and support a moratorium on evictions.

The city leadership's response - to support designating 24th Street as a Latino corridor, something Hernandez said leaders there have demanded for years - is too little, too late, he says.

While St. Peter Bookstore and G.G. Tukuy Indigenous Arts and Crafts each won their fights to stay on 24th Street, the battle - and protests against evictions and tech shuttles - continues.

At the same time, Hernandez is looking for ways to draw tech workers into volunteering or donating to help the poor.

He has a fundraising party planned May 4 to benefit John O'Connell High School that he hopes will draw tech-employed residents to check out the lowriders and sign up to volunteer in the community.

"I think he's one of the ones that can rally a lot of the community together," says Obregon, who met Hernandez at a mayor's youth music program when they were both about 17.

The Folsom Street high school, once a trade school that prepared students for jobs in auto mechanics and carpentry, now offers tech classes.

Hernandez's 15-year-old grandson, Andrew Skidmore, is taking his first tech class at O'Connell and thinking it might make a pretty good future career.

His grandfather beams proudly at that thought, then half-jokingly says, "Then maybe he can become a millionaire and buy up some of these properties."

But what would make him truly happy, he later says, is seeing his grandson not only become successful but also give back to the community.

Online extra

The changing Mission District

-- In 1990, 31 percent of the 17,000 households in the Mission had children younger than 18. In 2012, 18 percent of the 23,000 households had children.

-- In 1990, 54 percent of the district's 52,000 residents were Latino. In 2012, 39 percent of the 56,000 residents were Latino.

-- In 1993, there were 21 homicides in the Mission. In 2013, there were seven.

-- Overall violent crime increased in the Mission by 17 percent from 2012 to 2013, with more rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults.

-- Monthly rents in the Mission jumped from a median of $2,868 in November 2010 to a median of $3,839 in February 2014. For that same period, median monthly rents in San Francisco went from $2,975 to $3,518.

-- Home values in the Mission, calculated by Zillow, jumped from a median of $223,800 in April 1996 to $962,200 in February 2014. During this same period, median home values in all of San Francisco jumped from $258,000 to $887,700.

Sources: U.S. census, American Community Survey, San Francisco Police Department, Mission Economic Development Agency, Zillow